Reddit recently removed years of chat and message archives from users’ accounts without warning as part of an infrastructure upgrade. Many Redditors were upset to discover that their chat histories from before January 2023 were no longer accessible. Reddit claims they only migrated data from 2023 forward during the transition to the new chat infrastructure. Some users were able to retrieve some of their old messages by requesting their Reddit data, though others reported that not all messages were recovered. Along with this change, Reddit has recently made other unpopular decisions like ending Reddit Gold, showing a lack of communication and consideration for users’ sentimental attachment to their online data.
If only we could have understood how dangerous it would be for one or two generations of people with zero understanding of what “research” means to be allowed to propagate that misunderstanding to hundreds of millions of people.
Watching videos on YouTube doesn’t equal “research,” and thinking it does is actively making you stupid.